I wrote my first "philosophy" paper about this book for a final project in my high school AP English class. It has stayed with me for many reasons, not all of which I can easily explain. The subject matter has a lot to do with it: a close, vexed, loving and deeply flawed lifelong relationship between two (loving and deeply flawed) women; the possibility of redemption or grace for a (deeply flawed) human being; the palpable ineliminability of mystery and concealment as part of the human condition. The authorship of the book is also meaningful to me; my father taught me to read with a children's book by C.S. Lewis. And the provenance of this particular work represents the chronically obscured but essential status of women in the history of philosophy. (The listed author is Lewis, but the book was coauthored by him and his wife, Joy Davidman, and he could not have written it alone.) Finally, this novel is created by weaving together and deliberately, creatively blurring boundaries between ancient Greek and Christian theological themes. The significance of that hybrid beast to our own cultural ethics and cosmologies is a central topic of my own philosophical research.